From Abba’s Child by Brennan Manning:
Throughout my retreat with [the gospel of] John as my companion and guide, I was struck by his choice of verbs and adverbs in narrating his own perception of Jesus and that of others.
Upon being told by her sister Martha that Jesus had arrived in Bethany and wanted to see her, Mary got up quickly and went to him. Mary of Magdala is heartbroken and tearful when she finds the tomb empty. At the moment of recognition when Jesus calls her name, she clung to him. As soon as Peter and John receive word of the empty tomb, they ran together to the garden, but the other disciple, running faster than Peter, reached the tomb first.
Peter, the denier of Jesus, a failure as a friend in the hour of crisis, jumped into the water almost naked once John told him Jesus was on shore. “At these words, ‘It is the Lord,’ Simon Peter, who had practically nothing on, wrapped his cloak round him and jumped into the water” (21:7). John notes that the boat was about a hundred yards offshore.
These biblical characters, however clean or tawdry their personal histories may have been, are not paralyzed by the past in their present response to Jesus. Tossing aside self-consciousness they ran, clung, jumped, and raced to him.
Peter denied him and deserted him, but he was not afraid of him.
Suppose for a moment that in a flash of insight you discovered that all your motives for ministry were essentially egocentric, or suppose that last night you got drunk and committed adultery, or suppose that you failed to respond to a cry for help and the person committed suicide. What would you do?
Would guilt, self-condemnation, and self-hatred consume you, or would you jump into the water and swim a hundred yards at breakneck speed toward Jesus? Haunted by feelings of unworthiness, would you allow the darkness to overcome you or would you let Jesus be who he is — a savior of boundless compassion and infinite patience, a Lover who keeps no score of our wrongs?
John seems to be saying that the disciples of Jesus ran to him because they were crazy about him; or, in the more restrained prose of Raymond Brown, “Jesus was remembered as one who exhibited love in what he did and was loved deeply by those who followed him.”